County crime lab director feels connection with work

Share this:

Steven Hayes, the new director of the Alameda County Sheriff s Office Criminalistics Laboratory, shows off a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer available to criminologists at the Eden Township Substation near San Leandro. The machine separates and analyzes drug components.

Files have been stacked on Steven Hayes’ windowsill overlooking Interstate 880 since he became the new crime laboratory director for the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office Criminalistics Laboratory in July.

Hayes, 47, lives in Pinole and has had his plate full directing the only full-service forensics laboratory in the county besides that of the Oakland Police Department. The sheriff’s lab completes an average of 1,500 to 2,000 cases a year, including work submitted from other agencies.

Hayes supervises a staff of 25 who work on the second floor of the sheriff’s Eden Township Substation in unincorporated San Leandro. His predecessor, Tony Sprague, retired earlier this year after 37 years of service at the lab.

Hayes explained that it is the emotional connection that keeps most criminalists close to their work, though some of the everyday processes such as identifying blood on materials and conducting peer reviews can be repetitive.

“You’re helping to solve a crime,” Hayes said. “It’s related to someone who lost their loved one.”

He remembers being called to investigate the murder of 14-year-old JennyLin in May 1994, exactly three weeks after his first child was born. When Jenny was found in her Castro Valley home, Hayes worked overnight and through the weekend on the case, and the case is still under investigation.

The soft-spoken and detail-oriented Hayes has been a criminalist with the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office for more than 18 years, a career he clearly loves.

He grew up in Dublin, and as a criminal justice major at what was then California State University, Hayward, he was interested in becoming a police officer. But an adviser suggested that he might be more suited to forensics, so Hayes changed his major to chemistry.

“I’m more analytical,” Hayes said. “Police officers act right away because they don’t have much time to think about it.”

He went on to earn a master’s degree in forensic science at the University of Alabama and returned to California to continue studying chemistry.

He started working for the Sheriff’s Department as a specialist analyzing hazardous chemicals. He said that as the level of science within the last 15 years has risen, most criminalists have become specialists. For example, he said, it takes 18 months to fully train a DNA criminalist.

Hayes added that in the past seven years, DNA processing has become the bulk of the lab’s load, making up about 90 percent of the lab’s work, with fingerprint processing accounting for another 5 percent.

“Getting people exonerated is also very important,” he said.

Among his most intriguing experiences, he said, was seeing how drugs, which few people understood in the early 1990s, were developed, such as methamphetamine, now the most common drug processed in the lab.

“It was brand-new to everyone and was investigatively and scientifically challenging,” Hayes said.

For the past year, Hayes was chief of the Arson and Explosives section in San Francisco with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Forensic Laboratory. As part of his work, he traveled to clandestine labs to see how drugs were being made in people’s homes.

“Scientific evidence does not solve cases,” he said. “We support the hard work of the investigators.”

Sheriff’s Capt. Kevin Hart, who works closely with Hayes though he comes from a police background, said the two see eye-to-eye.

“We’re built from the same values of making sure we locate the forensic evidence,” he said.